To examine the social and economic impacts of the next Grand Solar Minimum – See About

Month: March 2013

Ice ages get started when the winter snow survives the summer warmth, and more snow piles on the next winter. The Northern Hemisphere has more snow that usual this spring, and that may delay planting while the snow melts and fields dry out, but I doubt this snow will last the summer.

•Climatic cyclicity in the continental interior contains also oceanic cycle of 1500 years

ABSTRACT

We conducted a high-resolution study of a unique Holocene sequence of wind-blown sediments and buried soils in Southern Siberia, far from marine environment influences. This was accomplished in order to assess the difference between North Atlantic marine and in-land climate variations. Relative wind strength was determined by grain size analyses of different stratigraphic units. Petromagnetic measurements were performed to provide a proxy for the relative extent of pedogenesis. An age model for the sections was built using the radiocarbon dating method. The windy periods are associated with the absence of soil formation and relatively low values of frequency dependence of magnetic susceptibility (FD), which appeared to be a valuable quantitative marker of pedogenic activity. These events correspond to colder intervals which registered reduced solar modulation and sun spot number. Events, where wind strength was lower, are characterized by soil formation with high FD values. Spectral analysis of our results demonstrates periodic changes of 1500, 1000 and 500 years of relatively warm and cold intervals during the Holocene of Siberia. We presume that the 1000 and 500 year climatic cycles are driven by increased solar insolation reaching the Earth surface and amplified by other still controversial mechanisms. The 1500 year cycle associated with the North Atlantic circulation appears only in the Late Holocene. Three time periods — 8400–9300 years BP, 3600–5100 years BP, and the last ~ 250 years BP — correspond to both the highest sun spot number and the most developed soil horizons in the studied sections.

“God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all Mankind,” lamented the Welsh historian James Howell in 1647, “for within these 12 years there have been the strangest Revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over.” The world, he thought, was “off the hinges”. He was not alone. As civil strife raged in the British Isles, rebellion tore holes in the empires of the Ming and the Ottomans, and central Europe bled in the Thirty Years’ War, other commentators sank into despair. Every day, recorded the Oxford scholar Robert ­Burton in 1638, brought news of “war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions; of towns taken, cities besieged in France, ­Germany, Turky [sic], Persia, Poland etc”. Four years later, a Spanish tract suggested a terrifying but increasingly popular explanation: “This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are now approaching the end of the world.”

For decades, historians havebeen gripped by the extraordinary ­agonies of the 17th century, from the civil wars in Britain and Ireland and the ­terrible ­suffering of war-torn Germany to the ­collapse of China’s Ming dynastyand the dismemberment of the hugePolish-­Lithuanian commonwealth. Eric ­Hobsbawm, probably the first historian to argue that there had been a worldwide “general crisis”, insisted that the causes were economic. By contrast, Hugh ­Trevor-Roper diagnosed a wider social breakdown, based on the conflict between court and country and driven by radical intellectual energy.

Now a third brilliant historian, the American-based British scholar Geoffrey Parker, has thrown a new element into the mix. In this vast, superbly researched and utterly engrossing book, Parker shows how climate change pushed the world towards chaos. This was, after all, the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures dipped across the world. The data, he insists, are “clear and consistent”, and he thinks the crisis began in the last years of the 1610s, at around the time of the outbreak of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. Snow fell in subtropical Japan; sub-Saharan Africa suffered a five-year drought; the rivers of modern Mexico and Virginia dried up; and across Europe, harvests failed and thousands starved.

But this was merely a taste of what was to come. The first months of 1621 were so cold that people walked across the frozen Bosphorus from ­Constantinople to Asia. In the early 1640s, violent winds and rain destroyed harvests across northern Europe, and in Germany soldiers reported seeing people frozen to death on the roads. England lost its king and the Peace of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end, but still the winds blew cold. Winters between 1654 and 1667 were, on average, more than 1C cooler than they are today. Indeed, throughout the second half of the century, the world was literally a colder place, as well as an emptier one. In China, Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the population fell by about a third, while in some parts of Germany the population fell by half. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes warned that without a strong state, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. For many people, it was like that already.

Yes Canada’s Arctic has warmed. I blogged about it most recently here. Many stations have a big spike around 2010.

What has happened since then?

I looked at Nunavut stations with Normals (anomalies) calculated by Environment Canada that have data for the last 3 years. (Most recent Nunavut Data Here. I’m looking at stations with data in column D)

Temperature is falling. From -8C to -12C per decade. Amazing.

Sure. Only 3 years. But did anyone else tell you this news? (Click to make bigger)

“March 10th 1947** was the day of the thaw ending the late snowy cold winter of 1947 in Britain & Europe and there was a giant sunspot group at the centre of the solar disc. This year, three magnetic (22yr) solar cycles later, solar activity has been generally very low and this day marked deep cold” – heralding more snow, on 12th , when snow-blizzards hit S/E England (Pic Folkstone) as WeatherAction forecasted in detail 25days ahead (see map).

“This is further evidence of the inevitable plunge – from now – into the new Mini-Ice Age we warned of some years ago”, said Piers Corbyn, astrophysicist of WeatherAction.com, March 10th.

“The CO2 story is over. It has been pointing the world in the wrong direction for too long. The serious implications of the developing MIA to agriculture and the world economy through the next 25 to 35 years must be addressed.”

The UN’s IPCC claims that modern global warming is “unprecedented” continues to be robustly discredited by the newest scientific research – another peer reviewed study confirms that the Medieval Warming (plus the Roman and Minoan) periods had significantly warmer summers (Kamchatka, Siberia) than our current period, which has atmospheric CO2 levels exceeding 350 ppm

Read here. Scientists from Europe and Russia reconstructed temperatures from a Kamchatka Peninsula sediment core that contained chironomids. As the chart on the right depicts, the scientists determined that there were extended periods, well before CO2 atmospheric CO2 levels of 350 ppm and greater, when summer temperatures were well above modern temps.

“A paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews reconstructs Arctic temperatures in Kamchatka, USSR over the past 4,500 years and finds the highest reconstructed temperatures were about 3.8°C warmer than modern temperatures. The authors find “the highest reconstructed temperature reaching 16.8 °C between 3700 and 2800 years before the present,” about 3.8°C above “modern temperatures (∼13 °C).” In addition, the data shows temperatures between 2500 – 1100 [during the Medieval and Roman warming periods] were about 1-2°C above modern temperatures of ~13°C.” [Larisa Nazarova, Verena de Hoog, Ulrike Hoff, Oleg Dirksen, Bernhard Diekmann 2013: Quaternary Science Reviews]

Belle Glade area vegetable farmers were assessing damage Tuesday after temperatures that dipped as low as 25 degrees Monday in isolated areas, ruining at least a few thousand acres of crops and costing farmers into the millions of dollars.

One of the signs of the next grand minimum is the shortening of the growing season, so I am interested in tracking late spring frosts and early fall frost.

Our Version 5.5 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for February, 2013 is +0.18 deg. C, a large decrease from January’s +0.50 deg. C. (click for large version):

These large month-to-month changes are not that uncommon, especially during Southern Hemisphere summer, and are due to small variations (several percent) in the convective heat flux from the ocean surface to the atmosphere.

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 14 months are: